“Shall I Be Your Chat Companion?” Towards an Online Human-Computer Conversation System Rui Yan1;3 Yiping Song2 1Institute of Computer Science 2Department of Computer and Technology (ICST) Science and Technology Peking University Peking University Beijing 100871, China Beijing 100871, China
[email protected] [email protected] Xiangyang Zhou3 Hua Wu3 3Baidu Inc. 3Baidu Inc. No. 10 Xibeiwang East Road, No. 10 Xibeiwang East Road, Beijing 100193, China Beijing 100193, China
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION To establish an automatic conversation system between human and To create a virtual assistant and/or chat companion system with computer is regarded as one of the most hardcore problems in com- adequate artificial intelligence has always been a long cherished puter science. It requires interdisciplinary techniques in informa- goal for researchers and practitioners. It is believed to be chal- tion retrieval, natural language processing, and data management, lenging for computers to maintain a relevant, meaningful and con- etc. The challenges lie in how to respond like a human, and to tinuous conversation with humans. How to respond like a human maintain a relevant, meaningful, and continuous conversation. The generally involves interdisciplinary techniques such as information arrival of big data era reveals the feasibility to create such a system retrieval, natural language processing, as well as big data manage- empowered by data-driven approaches. We can now organize the ment. A significant amount of efforts have been devoted to the conversational data as a chat companion. In this paper, we intro- research for decades, and promising achievements have been grad- duce a chat companion system, which is a practical conversation ually achieved so that we can expect real applications in real life, system between human and computer as a real application.